Civilizations

“Examines world history from the unique perspective of environments and ecosystems . . . from ice, tundra, and desert societies to sea and oceanic cultures.” —Library Journal
In this book, Felipe Fernández-Armesto redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization.
To Fernández-Armesto, a civilization is defined by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2,000-mile-long mountain range in South America have created the mold from which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures. In a grand tradition certain to evoke comparisons to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a panorama of cultural history. The medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the thousand-year-long destruction of the trees that once covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian Ocean has served as the world’s greatest trading highway for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives, but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in summer and the other in winter.
Seventeen distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations built on woodlands. Here are the familiar riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and the Nile, but also highland civilizations from the Inca to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea . . . even the Bushmen of Southern Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations of Chaco Canyon.
More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly told—of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod’s tract on maritime trade in the early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops. Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a “marvelous” achievement (Publishers Weekly).
“A history that highlights not warfare but farming, fishing, hunting, and herding . . . Stupendously informative and elegantly written.” —The Boston Globe
“Brilliant and brilliantly provocative.” —The Dallas Morning News
“An agile writer, possessed of impressively deep knowledge as well as originality. . . . A book full of surprises about humanity’s relations with nature.” —Booklist